THE QUEST OF 
THE IDEM 




GRACE RHYS 






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Class ':: J I S "s i 

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EfEted'GiiJMani Stratton 



THE QUEST OF 
THE IDEAL 



COPYRIGHT 1913 

By E. p. DUTTON & CO. 



THE QUEST OF 
THEIDE7M 



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I. THE CHARM OF THE WORD 

THE word '^ideal" is still beautiful, 
though it is in danger of being hor- 
ribly misused. It will be a pity if it 
is cheapened out of existence. I know of 
none that can take its place. Its roots strike 
deep into the past. It has grown up like a 
lily from an immemorial world. It is one of 
the fairest things among us and very nearly 
the most valuable. 

% Perhaps we shall appreciate it more if we 
call up some of its companions, if we can 
glance backwards at its origin; but it is no 
easy matter to get at the real source. When 
did the first faint conception of a possible 
ideal arise in any mind? Can any one sur- 
prise the moment of the capture of an idea, 



of 



1 



of the birth of a word : what is a thought be- 
fore it is thought? 

^ Phantoms arise, formless, blown like smoke 
along the far horizons of the mind. Day 
by day, night after night, the mind pursues 
the half-seen chase; a shadowy huntsman 
following a shadowy stag where hunter 
and hunted and forest are one. At last one 
mind more powerful than the rest, sees 
more clearly, and hunts more swiftly; the 
idea is grasped, a name is fixed upon it, and 
the world has a new word for its use; the 
mind of the world is the wiser by a 
thought. 

% Who can say how old is the Greek word 
^Sft), to perceive, to know? 
^ Less old is the Greek word iSiay an idea, 
form, appearance; which, unlike our English 
equivalent, may mean the appearance of a 
thought within the borders of the mind, or 
of form without; "that which is perceived," 
in fact; either without as form, or within, 
as thought. It is well to keep the inter- 
changeable nature of both these appearances 
clearly before the mind. Thought is form of 
a kind. Form often springs from thought. 
Here we begin to perceive the birth-right of 

2 



the strong mind upon whose movements wait 
the multiplicities of form. 
^ ctSos is another of these words, not very 
different in its meaning from idea. ctSwXov is 
likewise a kindred word; first it meant a 
phantom; an appearance which had no real 
existence, then it was by a curious twist of 
the mind fastened on the solid reflection of a 
false idea of the divine Spirit, — an idol. 
% These are fine words ; there is music in the 
sound of them, the music of the Spring- 
time of the mind. They have the sound of 
breaking chains, of the bursting of the 
sheath. From them we learn the ages-old 
action of the human mind at its greatest 
moments. 

^ It was probably Plato who gave us our 
earliest conception of the ideal. He had a 
notion of a perfect pattern of everything 
earthly subsisting somewhere in a heavenly 
country. He first put in words what we all 
feel and know. 

% And we owe him a debt; and we owe the 
poor misused word a debt. For the belief 
in a fixed good, not seen, but pictured as ex- 
isting across the borders of the seen and con- 
trasting with its misery or futility is one of 
3 ijthe 



the most powerful weapons ever put into the 
hand of man. 

IL THE PARADISAIC DREAM 

^ THE ideal first sprang into life from the 
contact with pain on one hand and beauty 
on the other; with one added ingredient 
which I shall mention later on. 
% Did some fearful pterodactyl, flying 
against the sunset in the effort to escape 
from another swifter than he, dream of a 
warm and gorgeous atmosphere where hor- 
rible combats would be no longer a necessity 
of his life? Did a wounded brontosaurus 
thundering in his swamp, dream, as he lifted 
his head from the mud, of placid lakes where 
unharmed he might trumpet to his mate and 
she to him? Paradise is always compounded 
of the finest moments of life as it is known 
and experienced by the dreamer. 
^ At first, while man was in his wild state, 
when the earth was untamed and the other 
ereatures were mightier than he, his life was 
a state of fear, a state it is difficult for us to 
have any conception of. The rabbit hunted 
by the weasel knows it; so does the small bird 
under the shadow of the hawk. Out of this 

4 



state Man had to rise by his own savage effort. 
By killing and slaying and mastering the 
earth, that old fierce and tormented one has 
gained a measure of peace for his kind. But 
it is along this fearful path men have come: 
the dream has been hard to rescue, hard to 
hold by, in a world ruled by blood and lust 
and fear. 

^ Our more gentle ideals were impossible in 
that old world. Men fashioned their heav- 
ens out of the best moments they knew. 
Remember those Northern warriors who lived 
by slaughter, who came out of their frosty 
north, terror running before them, and blood 
behind. Their heaven was pictured as a dark 
hall where they might sit drinking strong 
mead from the skulls of their enemies. And 
yet these terrible ones were the sons of God 
as well as we ; they knew the love of mate and 
child; they felt the Breath within the soul; 
they lived between the splendour of the waves 
and the blue tent of the open sky. 
S| The Turkish Heaven is not a much better 
place, less fierce, more sensual: set the para- 
dise of the cold north against the paradise of 
the warm south; the enemy's skull against 
the plump houri, and choose between if you 
5 ^ can. 



can. Better than either appears the Indian's 
dream of the wide prairie and the happy 
hunter. All the primitive heavens are built 
on these models. The paradise of the prairie 
flower would be the silent rolling sea of flower 
and leaf with neither stamping hoof nor rend- 
ing teeth to come next or nigh. The paradise 
of hoof and horn would be the wide green 
world vexed neither by hunter nor beast of 
prey. The paradise of the hunter includes 
the travail of the herd. 

III. THE RULER OF THE DREAM 

^ THE dream of Paradise was begotten, 
was it not, of pain on the one hand and joy 
on the other. But there was a third greater 
contributing cause, one that is an eternal puz- 
zle to express; it is at once the oldest thing 
in life and the most elusive; the most hack- 
neyed, the least understood ; the most familiar, 
the most mysterious; the most talked about, 
the least regarded; and that is the Source of 
Inspiration, the Feeder of the Soul. None 
of us, not the deepest spirited, understand it. 
No one can explain it, though temples in- 
numerable have been built to house it and 
millions of men's lives have been spent in 
6 



discoursing of it Still the mystery hangs 
there, our chiefest concern, our chiefest 
delight, incomprehensible always, always 
adored. 

^ What is it, whence is it, this wonder? 
How many names have been given to it, both 
on this star and on many another? Om, 
Allah, Zeus, Spiritus Sanctus, The First 
Cause, The Light Eternal, The Word, By 
this and many and other strange names men 
have tried to express this light and law: 
countless millions of women and men have at- 
tempted to explore its nature and faculties; 
they have tied it up tight in creeds and books ; 
they have leaped on their altars and cried and 
cut themselves, ay and other people too, with 
knives ; and the mystery still hangs there, un- 
thinkable, not to be imprisoned, in nature and 
faculties always the same. 
% Always the same: the same as It broods 
over the plunging of the fiery gulfs of the far 
suns ; the same as it lights the staggering beetle 
to its food along the moss; the same on the 
waste moor and in the crowded church; the 
same upon the forehead of the Saint and on 
this earth before ever a man was. 
^ It was the dim perception of the presence 
7 ^of 



of this Spirit that began to enter into and 
colour people's notions of paradise. It must 
evidently rule there since the earth was not 
without it. Those who understand nature 
know that the green kingdoms of the earth 
live under this law: that the footprints of the 
Unknowable One are to be found along the 
fields and in the wood, when they are missed 
from the dwellings of men. That is why the 
shepherd on the hills, the old wife at her cot- 
tage door, the negro in the cotton field, some- 
times collect a pure wisdom more valuable 
than the deliberate intelligence of books. 
^ Therefore since this irrefutable Law reigns 
over the earth, animating the least vital, and 
leaping into glory in the most splendid mo- 
ments of its most splendid creatures, how 
should Paradise be without that sweetness, 
better than honey to the simple soul? 

IV. THE LABOURER 

% THE Idealist stands with feet planted in 
the original clay from which he sprang. 
Above him is his dream. In his heart is a 
desire more or less strong to bring the actual 
into some likeness of the dream. The tool 
that is to shape out in this intractable earth 
8 



the ideal conscience at the root of him and 
thus connect the two is nothing but his will 
and his right hand. As a man fashions a gar- 
den out of rough ground, so must the idealist 
seize upon the material of life that is nearest 
to him ; so that at long last his eyes may look 
on what the eyes of his soul have beheld from 
the beginning. This is creator's work, tre- 
mendous work, for the raw material of life is 
stubborn and rude and hard ; — rude and hard 
enough to have broken many and many a 
great heart. Magnificent as they are, the 
laws that bind and shape this raw material of 
life are rude and hard also. 
% Which of us that has eyes to see and the 
power of thought but has staggered at that 
first law that life feeds on life? So terrible is 
it that men have covered it up and cloaked it, 
hiding it away from themselves and each 
other. Not one in a hundred dares to face it; 
each of us has his own brightly coloured 
screen, painted all over with impossible and 
beautiful designs, to put up to hide the truth. 
^ The true idealist is he who does not fear 
the truth, who takes the bitterest truth as the 
salted bread between his teeth and gets nour- 
ishment thereby. 

9 ^How 



% How can the gardener turn the waste to 
blossom unless he knows of the frost and the 
tempest, the blight and the worm? 
^ So must the idealist ponder well the whole 
picture of his dream, and the nature of his 
materials before he can get to work. The 
more widely he can cast his thought, the more 
sane and firm will his ideals be. The more 
thorough his knowledge, the less will be his 
fear of failure. 

^ We see then what enormous qualities the 
quest of the Ideal demands to-day; — a purity 
and a devotion to the dream as absolute as 
that of the heroes of the San Graal, a power 
of clear thought that shrinks from no truth, 
that seeks everywhere the essences of things, 
that examines the nature and properties of 
those appearances that make up his surround- 
ings : and besides, a strong right hand and the 
will to labour in obedience to the Law that 
commands the creation of order and beauty. 

V. THE GARDEN 

^ I HAD almost said that the will to labour 
and the power of the will, were the best quali- 
ties of the idealist; forgetting that they must 
always come second to the imaginative powers 
10 



of the soul. But even in this kingdom of the 
soul little is to be got without labour. 
^ Call the Soul a garden as they do on the 
backs of the prayer books and then look how 
heavy is the work. There is the soil full of 
ugly primitive worms and grubs and horned 
things struggling up from below. How must 
Will the Gardener bend and stoop and hoe 
and scratch to keep under these primitive ap- 
pearances! There are the flowers, the lovely 
virtues, all in rows, shedding a sweet savour; 
how soon they wilt and wither and the blos- 
soms fall; what great knowledge must the 
Gardener have of their natures and how un- 
tiringly must he tend them. There are the 
weeds with their inevitable secret growth; 
God knows how a whole crop may spring up 
in the heart of a morning. There is the rain; 
alas for our tears, but alas for the dry heart 
that has never known a sorrow. There is the 
awful mystery of the recurring visits of the 
sunlight: — the flowers stretching towards it 
through the night and spreading their cups 
in the morning. Without it they are not, be- 
cause of it they are. How did the bud know 
as it slept through the darkness that in the 
morning it would be blest? 

1 1 ^ When 



% When the mysterious sunlight and the good 
soil and the hand of the Gardener have done 
their work and rendered fruitful the garden 
of the Soul, — why then the work of the ideal- 
ist is only beginning. 

^ As the engraver cuts the well imagined pic- 
ture into steel or copper, so must the idealist 
reproduce in the clay on which he stands, — 
in stones and mortar and flesh and blood, the 
features of his dream. 



VI. ON THE MANIPULATING OF 
MATTER BY SPIRIT 

^ THERE is a relation between the para- 
disaic dream and the crude terrors of the ma- 
terial life; the link is the desire of the human 
creature to realise the dream within the limits 
of his material conditioning. The happy 
man is he who is able to shape out a course 
for his thought and actions which is fitted to 
bring about an agreement between Heaven 
and earth, — fitted to induce the dream to take 
up its abode within the bondage of matter. 
^ The unhappy man is he who fails; — per- 
haps through some lack of judgment or fac- 
ulty or pure strength. A greater than Sam- 

12 



son is wanted for this fight, in which God 
Himself is so often worsted. 
% For if there is one thing but too patent, 
it is that matter is capable of choking spirit; 
that Spirit has an almost insuperable difficulty 
in controlling matter. With her soft breath 
and tenuous hands the soul labours at her 
tremendous task of creating order and beauty 
out of chaos: often, too often the breath is 
sighed away, and hardly a line or mark is left 
to tell she has been there. For long enough 
spirit has been struggling in the grip of mat- 
ter; here and there emerging in a great and 
noble intelligence, continually thrust back and 
held down. 

^ How much spirit was there in the matter 
of the plecthyosaurus as he crawled on to the 
mud bank to lie in the sun? Consider the 
patience of the Mighty One who presided at 
his birth. What of the infant born yesterday 
into a slum to which the mud of the reptile is 
a garden — born to a stricken mother and a 
hypothetical father; no room indeed for it and 
no such gentle receptacle as a manger; an old 
black cloth for all its swaddling clothes. 
Consider the patience of the Mighty One who 
presides at that birth also! How much 
13 ^chance 



chance has that small being of conquering the 
varieties of matter by which it is surrounded, 
and of emerging into an ideal world? 
% There is infinite value in such spectacles 
for us; no true thing is ever shirked or put 
away in the dark that does not breed a rotten 
spot in thought and a corresponding feeble- 
ness of life. 

^ If spirit is here overwhelmed, and the 
idealists are the soldiers of the Spirit, the 
more need for their swords. 
^ If once the doctrine of an Omnipotence 
that could shape matter and life at will, and 
does not, were overthrown, how freely might 
you breathe I How freely act! We have 
done with the idea of an Omnipotent who 
might and could help and cure but will not. 
No more can the unhappy curse God and die. 
The responsibility is now transferred. 
^ We the ungrateful ones! We the sinners! 
We the blind! We the deaf who have 
stopped our ears to the music of the heavenly 
command that bids us live for Service! We 
the cold hearted that leave the Blessed One 
to suffer and die afresh each day in our hid- 
eous streets and lanes! 

% Gone the Hebrew ideal of the Angry Je- 
14 



hovah fighting and smiting and breaking his 
enemy's teeth at random! 
^ Gone the mediaeval Almighty, with his 
inscrutable code of morals, afflicting the inno- 
cent with misery, pains, and diseases, and for 
their good! 

% The problems solved that gave many of 
us a wet pillow before morning! 
^ All the world as a field of action when 
each man and woman and child stands forth 
as a helper in the new old crusade! 
% Consider then how bright a responsibility 
falls into the hand of man. 
% Loud and very loud the voice of the Beau- 
tiful One has been preaching in our ears; 
only a few of us have moved at all in answer. 
With many-coloured and many-shaped beau- 
ties He drapes every foot of earth, every hedge 
and ditch side. We answer by defiling His 
earth with hideous erections and stupid un- 
cleanness. He allows every one of us a share 
in His own creator spirit and many of us an- 
swer by creating vileness. 
^ Think of the joy of heart of each child 
born into the splendour of the new ideal. 
Every one with the love of the Unseeable One 
in his heart, every one with the love of his 
15 ^fellow 



fellow men, every one with a sword of light 
in his hand to liberate the Good Spirit of 
order and grace, to work in the service of this 
Spirit till the earth blooms as a garden. 
^ Even now any one can see how fast is the 
advance; it is certain that we are growing 
daily more powerful in dealing with matter. 
The angels of life have now at their disposal 
an electric current that thrills round the 
Earth. When this weapon is in the hands of 
the great ones great things will come into be- 
ing. 

% Great things are being done to-day. I 
have seen a clear spirit, grown powerful, shin- 
ing like a sun, smoothing out the most diffi- 
cult life, bringing marvels to light about it; — 
shape after shape of beauty rising up around 
it in ever increasing circles that grew finally 
world-wide. 

% It seems as though no limit could be set 
to the operations in matter of the powerful 
soul. 



VII. CONDUCTORS OF THE IDEAL 

^ ALL the lovers of heavenly things know 
that there is a moment when illumination 
i6 



comes as suddenly, passing as quickly as a 
bird that crosses the sky. There is no question 
but that these moments of inspiration are, to 
those who have known them, the greatest good 
in life. They bring ecstasy, which means 
simply a getting out of the body. 
H Any one who has felt this ecstasy in either 
a greater or a lesser degree must desire to ex- 
perience it again ; for this reason all the ave- 
nues to the ideal are explored. 
% Which are these avenues? Music is one. 
Painting another. Poetry. Wine perhaps? 
Or a fine day. Or a child's face. Boehme 
found his vision of heaven in a pewter plate. 
^^Sitting one day in his room his eye" (Boehme 
the shoemaker's) '^fell on a burnished pewter 
dish which reflected the sunshine with such 
marvellous splendour, that he fell into an in- 
ward ecstasy and it seemed to him that he 
could now look into the principles and deepest 
foundations of things. He believed that it 
was only a fancy and in order to banish it 
from his mind went out upon the green. But 
here he remarked that he gazed into the very 
heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and 
that actual nature harmonised with what he 
had inwardly seen. He said nothing about 
17 ^this 



this to any one, but praised and thanked God 
in silence/' 

^ We cannot all have the insight of a 
Boehme, and see Paradise in a pewter plate; 
but we all of us can know ecstasy, even heav- 
enly ecstasy and many and many are the roads 
by which we see it. For pure ecstasy brings 
wisdom, knowledge and peace. 
^ Men have built churches in order to cap- 
ture this ideal vision; all the resources of 
architecture, colour, light, sound and even 
perfume have been ransacked to this end. 
Along these many paths all converging to one 
point the vision comes to many. 
^ Others find that the divine voice is silent 
for them in the midst of so much human art 
and artifice. They leave the church with its 
linking arches and painted shadows, its in- 
cense and singing of boys and strive to make 
their souls in night and darkness, on the hill- 
side, by the sea, or in the still room. Others 
again seek this light in the eyes of their fellow 
men; in the hearts and the lives and the in- 
tellects of men they find the highest expression 
of all forms of life; and in the service of the 
ideal in mankind they lose and find them- 
selves. 
i8 



^ Some seek the vision of the Graal by the 
road of the cultivation of the inner self ; every- 
thing goes down before that tremendous pre- 
occupation — homely life and love and simple 
ways, all appetite, joys of the senses, claims of 
their fellow men: nothing matters to them 
but the call that resounds through the emptied 
spaces of their souls. 

^ Set against these the men who search for 
the ideal by the road of the senses. There is 
many a cruel lover who tests and tries and 
flings away hearts who in some dim blind way 
is searching for the one pure gem that he has 
figured to himself in his dreams. There are 
some who even in their lust are seekers; 
strange and contradictory as that may seem. 
^ There is another sort still who have been 
in love with an imagined beauty and break 
their hearts because the primitive laws of life 
are so fierce, so much at war with the features 
of their dream. These are the people of large 
hearts, brains and appetites who are strong 
enough to shake off traditions of thought, 
keen enough to see the limitations of reality, 
not strong enough of will and not wise enough 
to devise a means of bringing the two, the 
ideal thought and the obstinate material of 
19 ^dife. 



life, into harmony. These are the sort who 
are always hoping for an imagined good by 
the road of excess ; who fly to the never ending 
and quite certain consolation of satisfying 
their appetites; certain at least as long as their 
appetites last. How many of this sort have 
not used whisky as a refuge from thought? 
That drunken woman with her hat on one side, 
that man rolling home and singing as he goes, 
they may be idealists at heart; neither you nor 
I can tell. 

^ It is a wise man that can say where appe- 
tite ends and the search for the ideal begins. 
The fact is, there is no division. Nose, 
tongue, hand, eye and ear; ay and the whole 
body; such are the roads by which the divine 
comes to man. There is no getting out of the 
body — for long, at least. The more necessary 
that it should be clean: that a seal should be 
set upon each gateway, that the Blessed One 
may not falter at any entrance, nor be turned 
away at the doors. 

VIII. THE BASIS OF THE IDEAL 
A Chapter not to be read in a drawing-room 
^& CAN it be that the mediaeval hell was a 
more philosophic idea than it has of late 

20 



gained ^ credit for? It seems to have ex- 
pressed something that we try to leave out; 
it expressed the terror of life, the central fires, 
the split lightning in the hand of Jove. 
^ We live a strange life nowadays; we are 
huddled together in our massed cities, pro- 
tected from Nature's boldness by our clever 
inventions ; so it comes that we are apt to for- 
get the hole of the pit whence we are digged. 
We like to think of Nature and the God in 
Nature as something pitiful, gentle and se- 
rene as a good woman ordering her house. 
But the laws of Nature are not so; it is right 
that we should know it. 
^ It is good for us sometimes to detach our- 
selves from the every-day conditions of our 
daily life, to look down into the roots and 
foundations of our being and our thoughts. 
A down pillow and a screen — is that what 
we are wanting; or is it a glimpse of the 
truth; sweet or bitter, what matter so it be 
the truth? It is good for us to have all our 
down pillows snatched away and to be forced 
from a warm fireside out into the open air, 
even if it is to face the rain and the storm. 
% The divine Beatrice went down into hell ; 
so should we all for a season, for heaven rests 
21 ^upon 



upon hell of a sort Our very peace and our 
ideals depend upon the balance of turbulent 
forces. The sunlight by which we live is an 
emanation from an appalling and unthinkable 
chaos of flame. 

% When we look at the welter out of which 
we have risen, we see man then for what he 
is, the most cruel, lustful and bloody of all 
the beasts; and wonder of wonders the most 
godlike too. 

% Many men and most women would rather 
not look on these things at all. Their creed 
is that the evil that is not spoken of, is not 
there. They will sin as it were behind the 
hand. The good women who do not sin, pre- 
tend they know nothing. They have even 
elevated their determined ignorance into a 
virtue. 

^ To these good women one might say that 
Beatrice still shone in hell, that she emerged 
thence more lovely and more wise. A fig for 
drawing-room pretences. It is as though our 
city fathers were too pure-minded to look into 
the city sewers; and the consequences, moral 
and physical, might make a match of it. No ; 
we cannot be wise unless we look at life as a 
whole. The more the boundaries of our con- 

22 



sciousness are enlarged, the saner becomes our 
attitude towards life ; the more wisely we shall 
deal with the seething of the life force that 
goes on at our doors, and within them. 
% All this our modern existence tends to sup- 
press. How many a hot young man has been 
driven from his home by the too much bread 
and milk, by the ignoring of the world, the 
flesh and the devil whose voices are roaring 
in his ears. 

^ As four walls and a lighted hearth will 
shut out night, storm and cold, so does our 
soft primness seek to cover away the turbu- 
lence of life. 

^ Revolt, rage, lust, fear and pain, they are 
all there; the counterparts in the soul of the 
grim forces of the universe. Governed and 
ordered, they become strength, energy, agility, 
rapidity, beauty; and at the last, peace. 
^ We are the children of mystery, born of 
the mud and the fiery sun. There is no peace 
for us save the peace of balanced forces. 
% It is diflScult to express exactly what I 
mean. What could be more peaceful than a 
summer evening of sunshine? Yet look what 
enormities of force and fire and headlong mo- 
tion have brought it about. 

23 % What 



1% What could be quieter than the peace of 
a saintly face? But that too is builded upon 
central fires. What you see there is the 
chained energy of potential outbreakings and 
storms ; that peace is the more lucent because 
of the primal force on which it rests. 
S| The great man is he whose passions have 
learned to sit as quiet as the eagle at the feet 
of Jove. The ruling woman is she who guides 
the men of her house by scarcely perceptible 
motions. Knowing the power of the forces 
of life, having governed her own soul, she 
governs others by a smile. 

IX. ON CONSCIENCE 

^ THE question of conscience is curiously 
related to the ideal. What is it, this thing 
we call conscience? What is it that smites 
us this hard blow when we have been false to 
our own code of right? Watch your sensa- 
tions when you have done or said an unwise, 
even ever so slightly cruel thing: tell me then 
if something does not strike a blow at your 
heart, sickening you, half-stopping your 
breath, punishing you till you have repented 
and made good your fault. Who is it strikes 
the blow? Who is it holds the whip? 
24 



^ Children suffer under the strokes of this 
tormentor. I remember a kind father forgiv- 
ing a troublesome little chap of three. He 
patted his back and said, 'There now, you 
will be father's good little boy?" "No, no," 
said the child, bursting into a passion of tears, 
and throwing himself into his father's arms: 
"No, no! It's dada's naughty, wicked little 
boy." This thing of three had already his 
own private ideals and wept to find himself 
falling short. 

% The interesting fact is that the bold fellow 
who drives you with his whip is just as fal- 
lible as can be : he is always making mistakes ; 
often he lets you off when you have been do- 
ing what other people can see is wrong: all 
the while you and your foolish conscience 
have been as happy as possible together. Not 
only is he a stupid fellow, requiring to be 
educated, but he is also a very simple fellow; 
you yourself can pet and handle and delude 
him; put him and his whip to sleep with false 
promises, bad reasoning, and other narcotics. 
There he will lie and drowse and sicken and 
give you scarcely any trouble unless fear comes 
to wake him. 

% On the other hand, I have known good 
25 ^ people. 



people, the saints of the earth, cherishing a 
great bloated overgrown conscience. This 
monster has ruled their every moment with 
a rod of iron; reduced them to a diet of bread 
and fruit, and forced them little by little into 
an active and suffering sainthood. 
^ That is what a pampered conscience does. 
It becomes a clumsy monster who will know 
no bounds and no excuses. It will work yoti 
like the stoker of an engine. It will strip you 
of your fine linen and your outer garment, and 
drive you at last upon the arms of a cross. 
% And after all, why not? Better any an- 
guish than the slow suffocation of ease. 

X. THE WEAPONS OF IDEALISM 

^ THE Real and the Ideal! What harm 
has been done by this senseless antithesis! 
The Ideal is by far the realest thing on earth, 
as political economists and statesmen are be- 
ginning to find out through their mistakes. 
^ All the people who live for noble ends, the 
great people of the earth, are idealists. It is 
they who have the gift to divine the uses and 
properties of matter, who see through it and 
beyond it and all around it by means of its 
properties, and control it to great ends. 
26 



^ Give stones and mortar to an idealist who 
has had the force and will to learn their uses 
and the control of them and he will build you 
a cathedral. His idealism will give the mere 
rough material of his trade a value which is 
not to be measured. Give the same material 
to the cunning man of small brain, to the 
man who is called the practical man, and he 
will build you a hideous street, cheating as 
he goes, in which his lack of real practical 
sense is manifest, because, in flat disobedience 
to the commands of his Creator, he is creating 
an unremunerative ugliness, when remunera- 
tive beauty might have better rewarded him. 
Bricks and stones have often been the weapons 
of the idealist, and will be so once more in the 
future. 

% Colour and line are other ideal weapons. 
Give a blank wall to one who has had force 
of will to learn the control and the use of 
colour and he will present you with the glories 
of the imagination. The human creature who 
is all appetite and no imagination will deco- 
rate it for you with foul words ; which wall of 
the two will have the most real existence, that 
adorned with the ejaculations of appetite or 
that which speaks the language of the soul? 
27 ^ They 



They are both real; as the thrush and the 
wood-louse may haunt the same tree; and by 
that I mean no disrespect to the woodlouse, 
who is a clever enough little beast in his way, 
as you will soon see if you tickle him with a 
straw. 

^ Science is one of the strongest weapons of 
the idealist. All the greatest scientists have 
been and are idealists; they have great and 
clear imaginations that can leap at the living 
principle behind appearances, and work upon 
that. Galileo was not the only one of them 
who lived and died for an ideal. What saint, 
what poet has ever had a greater imagination 
than Tyndall? Was ever truth more nobly 
expressed than by him? With a little gas and 
a few yards of tubing, his singing flame will 
tell you some of the deepest secrets of the 
universe. And there are one or two of his 
sort alive to-day. 

% These are only a few of the weapons of 
idealism; there are a thousand others. I 
should weary of cataloguing them. Smiles, 
tears, laughter, good cookery, humour, cold 
water, sunlight, common sense, yes, and car- 
bolic. On the subduing weapon of love I 
cannot even touch, so mighty a mystery is it, 
28 



as broad and deep as the ocean and much more 
incomprehensible. I will only mention one 
more, one whose power and importance war- 
rants me in dealing with it separately. 

XL MONEY 

^ MONEY is one of the chief weapons of 
idealism. The Latin authors said that the 
Druids sold places in the other world in return 
for money. That is a very suggestive bit of 
scandal. Possibly it is partly true; after all 
why should not one visit the nearest apparent 
Guardians of Paradise with treasure? 
^ Money in those far-away times was a much 
purer and simpler thing than it is to-day. It 
was a symbol of labour; whether the hard 
labour of fighting or the quieter labour of the 
fields or the highly-prized labour of the smith, 
the artist in metals or in embroidered clothing. 
% Those who sacrificed the fruit of such 
efifort in symbol at the doors of the unknown 
were by no means fools of their own inven- 
tion. All true labourers do, in one way or 
another, so ofifer their labours; why, the very 
rascals of commerce who have shorn their 
brothers and sisters as close as a June flock in 
spite of helpless baaings — when they have 
29 ^heaped 



heaped up their pile of fleeces as high as the 
stars, so that all men gape upon it with open 
mouths, are they not constrained to make an 
offering to the ideal which in spite of them 
lurks in the background of their thought? 
These offerings may take the shape of hospital 
wards, churches, gold jugs and basins pre- 
sented for the Almighty's use, parks, libraries 
and other public institutions. 
% In so far as such things are precipitations 
of personal vanity they are simply curious. 
Probably there is mixed up with this motive 
a concession to their own still surviving sense 
of the best; and also a concession to other 
people's ideals, for which they still have a 
respect which is almost fear. 
^ Now arises the question: can a gift of 
tainted money brought by impure hands turn 
to good? The more one puzzles over this 
question, the more complex and difficult it 
appears. Money is certainly an impersonal 
thing: if you or I steal a sixpence that six- 
pence is just the same as any other, yet should 
we expect what is called ''a blessing" with it? 
Yet it would be quite a healthy sixpence if 
passed on to any one else. 
% Perhaps tainted money in impure hands 
30 



never can quite be a sword of light. Some 
unsavoury flavour will hang about the jug 
and basin, the park, the library or the statue 
and what not: there will be something in the 
mode of giving, some lack of a true equation 
between the thing given and those to whom 
it is given, or else a fault in the manner of 
giving, that will stamp the gift and keep it 
from thriving. 

^ On the other hand, I do believe that tainted 
money in pure and innocent hands used for 
ideal ends can become extraordinarily power- 
ful. Remember that all money is a symbol of 
effort or labour of some kind; any creature 
who has money is as if it were possessed of a 
little army of goblin hands which can be set 
to work both fast and well on any task their 
master chooses ; — to work with a goblin clev- 
erness too, far in excess of any qualities owned 
by their master. 

^ He or she who has money then is possessed 
of a talisman as powerful as the ring or the 
lamp of the Arabian Nights' tale; with this 
difference, that the talisman is a more delicate 
one than is told of in any marvellous tale. 
% This is its virtue; when held in the hand 
of the owner it takes the colour of the heart; 
31 ^it 



it turns to a poisonous mass, exhaling an evil 
odour, in the hand of the vicious ; it turns to 
trash in the hand of the fool ; it shines a long- 
rayed star of powerful emanations in the hand 
of him who loves his fellow-men. 



XII. SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE 

% ONE day I happened to find myself among 
a little group of people on a winter afternoon. 
The talk ran presently on a woman known to 
us all, whose husband was openly and repeat- 
edly unfaithful and quite indifferent to her; 
yet the woman still clung to her uncomfortable 
position as his wife. "It is extraordinary," 
said one of the party, "how a woman of her 
intelligence can be contented to take the 
shadow and leave the substance.'' 
^ I felt curious at once to see how such a 
remark would be taken; glancing round, at 
each face in turn, I saw that no one had mis- 
understood. There was neither hesitation nor 
questioning on any face. 
% Here was an extraordinary thing; such a 
paradox to be taken as a commonplace among 
people who made no parade of religion or 
higher thought! 
32 



% What was the interpretation of that re- 
mark? 

^ That love is substance ; that such things as 
income, houses, silver forks and motor cars 
may be shadows: real enough if they stand 
for the real things, otherwise valueless. 
^ That is to say that the spiritual is the one 
reality, the material is the reflection. 
^ And to say that people accept such a wild 
notion for a rule of life ! 
^ How many of us look at solid things as 
shadows and seek for the spirit of which they 
are the projections? How many of us know 
only those solid shadows, those affluent pro- 
jections? 

^ How many of us but would hurry to the 
potter's field and pick up those thirty pieces 
of silver to put them in the bank? 

Pecunia non olet; ^^Money has no smell." 
Is not that a respectable doctrine? And how 
many subscribe to it? 

^ On the other hand there are very many 
people who hold half unconsciously the other 
faith, wild and transcendental as it looks when 
written down: good comfortable people and 
unreflecting, perhaps over-valuing their pos- 
sessions, yet holding to the right by instinct, 

33 ^& for 



for whom the sun would lose its light, and 
life lose all its value if they were forced into 
cruelty or dishonour in order to keep their 
hold of those possessions. In such a case as 
that, a dining-room table may be the pleasant 
projection of a man's sunny goodwill towards 
his kind. In another and a worse case you 
may have the same class of table, qua legs and 
finish, and yet no better thing than an altar to 
a belly god. 

% It is the spirit that animates the table that 
really counts. 

% It is the animating spirit that counts every- 
where. One of the things that have most 
staggered reflecting people, from David on- 
ward, is the apparent success of the unright- 
eous. The lovers of the concrete, the wor- 
shippers of the material for its own sake, 
the masters and mistresses of the art of grab, 
how they get on ! 

^& Well, let them! Why should you, oh 
good man! oh good woman! covet their fester- 
ing rubbish heaps? Do you know the venom 
generated by a great pile of ill-gotten fer- 
menting money? Moreover before you com- 
plain of the success of the unrighteous, you 
have to be quite sure that your man is what 
34 



you take him for. He may have a quite 
beautiful vein of virtue in him that sweetens 
the whole lump. For instance, I have seen 
the worshipper of the material for its own 
sake succeed and flourish; but when I have 
looked carefully into his case, I have found 
that he has been an idealist somewhere: per- 
haps a devoted husband and father; and with 
a motive that has seemed pure to himself he 
has wrung the hearts of others. His dealings 
with matter, which for the sake of the crea- 
tures beloved by him he has learned to control, 
have been masterly. Perhaps his sole fault 
has been that he has worn a pair of moral 
blinkers, that he has made the mistake of con- 
founding spirit and matter (one often made 
by political economists who should be wise) 
and has taken and pounded the hearts and the 
souls and the lives of his brothers and sisters 
in his mortar along with the rest! 
^ And in any case, why should you, oh 
brother, oh sister, with your hands full of 
lilies and roses, honey on your tongue, and the 
far music of a dream in your ears, vex your 
souls because of a cock crowing on a dunghill? 



35 



XIII. THE BEAUTIFUL WAY 

% QUITE poor and apparently unimportant 
people sometimes have a large influence. In 
small ways they are great. The large spirit 
grown powerful through exercise may be able 
to deal freely with life and with matter, and 
bring about great results: — most of us have 
to be content with small things. But even in 
the doing of the smallest thing there lurks a 
wonderful efficacy and sweetness, if only it be 
done in a Beautiful Way. I have met people 
who never talked about an ideal, and who 
would be frightened at the notion of enter- 
taining one, who yet had a beautiful way of 
doing things. 

% Simple things done beautifully have the 
gift of becoming translucent. They acquire a 
large significance. 

^ You can light a fire and tend a hearth in 
such a way that it becomes a symbol of all the 
lighted hearts in the world. 
^ You can place food on a table in such a 
way that those whom you serve are thrice fed. 
^ You can put clothes on as cleanly and as 
fairly as the rose clothes itself in June. 
^ I have seen a woman bid good day to a 
shop-assistant in such a way as to spill a radi- 

36 



ance on the counter, and bring depths of sweet- 
ness and hills of peace before the worker's 
eyes. Why there is even a way of rebuking 
that generates love. 

^ There are creatures so endeared of heaven 
that all they do is lovely and smacks of the 
country of their dreams. Not all of us are 
dear to heaven, and our self-conscious efforts 
after the Beautiful Way may be ludicrous to 
other folk; but if we persist in our efforts 
something will pierce through our clumsiness. 
^ The light that shines at the wick of a tallow 
candle is made of fire and related to the light 
of sacred lamps. 

% Even if you have to cook pies or sit on a 
high stool doing accounts you can do it in an 
extraordinary way. A sort of flavour will 
hang about you and your pies and your 
accounts. At odd moments those who come 
in contact with you will have glimpses of 
those deep seas of light where your daily ablu- 
tions are performed. 

XIV. ON THE FORMING OF 
IDEALS 

^ ONE might almost say that there are as 

many different kinds of idealists as there are 

37 ^ people 



people; — that there are as many ideals as 
there are souls. 

^ What is the ideal of life for you and me? 
^ There is not one common to us both ; there 
are a few broad points on which we can meet, 
but my set of working ideals would hardly 
do for you, nor yours for me. Yours might 
be too complicated for me, mine too unprac- 
tical for you. The essence of this thing we 
call the ideal is that it should be a pictured 
image or a series of pictured images of life; a 
sort of triple extract of human conclusions 
concerning the forms and appearances of 
things, boiled down and reduced to theory. 
As a matter of fact all of us harbour an end- 
less series of working ideals relating to things 
within and without the mind; for instance I 
have my own notion of a perfectly darned 
sock; of what blackberry jam should be; and 
what, a sequence of ideas. You too have a 
storehouse of such samples of perfection which 
you are eternally turning over and taking out 
for use. 

^ When we say that so and so has a high 
ideal we mean a most complicated and diffi- 
cult thing; we mean that he is in possession 
of a whole gallery of beautiful patterns of 

38 



^'- 



thought, language, manners and achievement 
of all sorts. 

% The value of such a gallery of ideals de- 
pends a good deal on the power and lucidity 
of the mind that has collected them. 
% Some people are vs^ithout sufficient think- 
ing power to evolve an ideal for themselves ; 
as a rule they accept the ideals of the thinkers 
who have preceded them, under the name of 
religion. A good thing that they do. Who 
wants the conclusions of a fool upon folly? 
The ready-made code is safe and sure. The 
fresh waters of spring may well run in the 
noble old courses. 

% But if we are to be of real value we must 
reflect: — reflect with passion and with truth; 
nothing is to be accepted ; everything is to be 
examined ; so fast do new forms of life evolve 
that last year's virtue must appear in a differ- 
ent trim to-day and take another weapon in 
her hand. The love of the supreme good and 
of our fellow men may yet drive us on to 
strange thoughts and deeds, unthinkable and 
undoable in the long ago. 
% We have said that the idealist stands with 
his dream above him and his feet in the mud. 
Between the two are the hands that must bring 
39 % the 



the intractable clay into some likeness of the 
heaven he has conceived. As time goes on 
and his labours go on, the clay takes un- 
expected shapes about him, some beautiful, 
some ugly and mean. His dream too alters 
with the years. He wants now to remedy 
some of his mistakes; he wants to embody 
some of the new features of his dream. He 
himself alters with the years. So it is that our 
ideals must be elastic, we must be ever ready 
to deal with fresh circumstances. The old 
ways may be better than the new ways ; but the 
new ways may have some seed of betterment, 
of progression in them that the old ways 
lacked. To be rigid is generally to be wrong. 
We may want new laws to fit a whole nation 
full of a new sort of people. 
^ We shall never be right till we have re- 
considered our ideals. 

% We shall never get right till we have 
ceased to believe in the Victorian clever man's 
principle that men might be used as machines. 
% We shall never get right till the human 
babe becomes for us sacro-sanct; — whether its 
father be saint or sinner, whether he choose to 
forsake it or no. 

% We shall never get right till natural law, 
40 



and not the male, is left to determine the 
relative functions of man and woman. 
^ We shall never get right till wt have 
formed a national ideal of responsibility to 
the earth's surface beginning w^ith such trifles 
as ginger-beer bottles and paper-bags and end- 
ing up with battle-fields, railway companies 
and slums. 

^ We shall never get right till we have a 
new Doomsday Book of the towns of the 
country written out fairly for all men to read. 
% We shall never get right till we have a new 
international ideal. The world has had 
enough of the morals of the public-school boy 
in the diplomatist's coat. The day when the 
"cannon's flesh" rises up and refuses its destiny 
will be a great day in the history of mankind. 
^ Meantime we had all better cultivate elas- 
ticity of mind, which includes tolerance, with- 
out which our ideals may become mere rods 
to whip each other's backs. 

XV. MATERIAL OF THE IDEALIST 

% ALL that is of real value to a life proceeds 
from within outwards. No beauty, riches, 
honours, are of real import to any unless 
the soul within is beautiful, rich and honour- 
41 ^ able 



able enough to enter into correspondence with 
its opportunities. You cannot give any living 
creature that which has no relation to himself. 
You cannot give a burglar the Divina Corn- 
media. You cannot give the National Gal- 
lery to a procuress. You cannot give a sunrise 
to a cardsharper. You cannot give^human 
souls in charge to a person who hasn't got one. 
% You cannot give cities in charge to men of 
no wider view than the mole who only sees 
his own little underground path. 
^ When the devil wanted to show Christ the 
kingdoms of the world, he took him up to the 
top of a high mountain. Let any one who 
wishes to see what the kingdoms of the world 
look like to-day, climb to the highest acces- 
sible point in the heart of a great city. 
% Get up to the top of St. Paul's and behold 
London. Look over that vast heaving sea; 
before you have looked long you will be ready 
to confess the powerlessness of man to control 
the destinies of men. 

^ There it lies, a living ocean: — house roofs 
peaked like ranks of ocean waves. What 
man's eye or hand wrought these things or 
brought these masses together? It was no 
man at all. The strongest of us and the most 
42 



intentionate are but livelier instruments of far 
travelling forces, whose beginning and whose 
ending no one knows. 

^ On such an eminence as this all rancours 
drop away: what large matters are these men^s 
pigmy foulness, those men's pigmy tyrannies 
and hates? We are in the presence of vital 
impulses which have whirled men into a 
centre as the streaming nebulae are whirled. 
Such a spectacle as this is one of those evolu- 
tions which are as independent of the will as 
the massed movements of birds, the westward 
and eastward movement of crowded hu- 
manity, the crusades, the necessity that covers 
the sea with ships and sends men crawling to 
the top of high mountains and the poles. 
^ The vastness of the thing amazes: what 
does it portend? Look at that heaving and 
distracted sea ; think of the million children's 
lives there, stunted and granite-bound. In 
God's name, what pattern of life can we fit to 
these people's needs? 

% Look deep enough, and perhaps it will 
appear that here in the midst of terrors is 
the very point of salvation. Here has been 
formed, independent of any human will, the 
monster crucible in which the human race is 
43 ^to 



to be fused and refined. The vast cauldron 
whirls and seethes and threatens eruption; 
countless fresh units of life are attracted to 
it and caught in, there to be fused with the 
rest. 

^ And the movement is not all centripetal. 
Already we see the centrifugal tendency 
counteracting. Having learned what the 
city has to give, another and quite new race 
of creatures is flung ofif on the land. It is not 
all bad, this huge melting-pot of mankind. 
There is no need to despair. ^^Don't look at 
it from the top downward," said the poet son 
of a drunken carpenter to me the other day. 
^^Look at it from below upward, if you want 
to see the light. It becomes glorious then." 
Glorious it might be to him because his genius 
had set him free : it is often not very glorious 
to the others. Yet there was truth in what he 
said. There is life in that mass. There is a 
heaving in the lower depths that betokens life. 
Imponderable shapes and essences float above 
it, the thoughts and ideals of men, changing 
always, unrealised as yet. 
^ Moreover the women, for so long sub- 
merged and silenced, are beginning to rise; 
some strong impulsion drives them on; they 
44 



are taught by hard lessoning that on them de- 
pends the race, that in freedom with good 
counsel there is health and life; that the sons 
of slaves share in the mother's abasement ; that 
the soul, the light-giver and leader of the 
body, faints and corrupts when exposed to 
ignominy. 

^ Hope is moving the people; now what 
ideal to set before them to help them to their 
hope? Here is the raw material of life; raw 
indeed. There yonder is the excellent pattern 
of the dream. How can the will and the two 
hands of the idealist so work upon this mass 
as to bring the two into some semblance of 
each other? 

% But the idealists are at it already, a thou- 
sand of them! The miracle will accomplish 
itself; they, we, can no more help going for- 
ward than the stream can help running to the 
sea. Let us only discern which way the uni- 
versal current sets, so that we may save our- 
selves the trouble of swimming up-hill. Go 
forward we must: and where is the sense of 
doing it backwards? 

^ Those men who, gripping their property, 

oppose the advance of social science; those 

men who oppose the advance of women, re- 

45 ^ mind 



mind me of nothing so much as of a he-goat 
that butts at the edges of a travelling bog. 
% No; let us sail with the blessed wind and 
not against it. Give liberty and give bread 
to soul and body. Let us be rid of the illusion 
of purely male energy that is without pity, 
without wisdom, and without love. 
^ For heaven's sake, let us teach the children 
to be good. We shall bring all the nation 
into contempt, if we do not. You cannot 
build up a respectable State on a foundation of 
rotten units. 

^ Some day we shall come to try the spirit 
as a weapon. We have never tried it yet. 
When we do we shall find it to be the true 
earth shaker, stronger and more persuasive 
than the cannon or the sword. 
^ The walls of Jericho fell down at the sound 
of a trumpet; so might the old walls of pride 
and stupidity fall down round the City of 
Souls and the flood come in. 
% Did the wind of the spirit, blowing 
strongly from the right quarter but gain an 
entrance, we should all become intelligent 
enough to believe in the power of simple good- 
ness; — simple private goodness which is the 
only thing for all of us from the Lord Cham- 

46 



berlain down to the knife and boot boy. Not 
a comfortable soul among us but would be 
willing to lay down his meal too many and 
his superfluous bits of shining metal and stone 
in order to bring light to the myriad eyes of 
the disinherited children who should be our 
care. 

% Not a lazy soul among us but would leave 
his selfish muddling to help in the labour of 
regeneration, a work for angels and for gods, 
incomparably difficult, incomparably great. 

XVI. THE REWARDS OF THE 
IDEAL 

^ I HAVE not lived long enough to watch 
the generations. I can only record here the 
result of say twenty intelligent years of obser- 
vation; — not long enough to entitle one to 
speak with authority. Still, twenty years 
make a long enough space in which to come to 
a conclusion. The conclusion I have come to 
is that the rewards of the ideal are constant 
and valuable. At one time I did not think 
it was so. I was forced during some years to 
conclude that cunning was the most valuable, 
the most frequently and richly rewarded of all 
qualities, — the cunning that is the grand tool 
47 ' ^5 of 



of the appetites ; the cunning that knows how 
to handle men and women and facts, with an 
unsleeping eye to its own advantage. 
% Later on when I found Cunning sitting 
among his gathered sheaves I was not particu- 
larly enticed by the quality of the harvest, nor 
by the flavours that pervaded the harvest field. 
^ On the other hand when I became intelli- 
gent enough myself to watch the pilgrimage 
of a soul living for ideal ends through all the 
intricacies of shows and appearances that 
make up our life, I became gradually more 
impressed. I had seen a good many things: I 
had seen a dull soul gradually extinguishing 
the beauty of a noble face and form ; form and 
face growing more opaque and heavy year by 
year. I had seen a coarse soul, born to every 
shape and appearance of material beauty, sur- 
rounded from birth with all the shows and 
forms that are for delight, — I had seen that 
soul make a hell for itself and others out of a 
Paradise of the senses. 

^ Now I saw a pure soul growing strong, 
and conquering untoward and difficult sur- 
roundings precisely as a man by labour con- 
quers a harsh unfruitful soil. I have watched 
that soul interpenetrate others, while weaving 

48 



about itself continually widening circles of 
colour and light. 

^ Lastly I saw a fine spirit literally draw 
afresh the lines of a plain uninteresting 
countenance. 

% Have I seen, or do I delude myself in 
thinking I have seen the child born of the 
heavenly mind fairer than its parents in body 
because of their power of thought? 
% Can fine minds improve a breed or race? 
Be sure they can. 

% Other rewards the pursuit of the Ideal 
brings with it; for one thing it leaves the 
seekers no time to he lazy minded; the con- 
stant falling short, the humiliation, the lapses, 
the repentance that follows these lapses; the 
ceaseless effort to discriminate between values 
and appearances; all this preserves in the 
mind the agility and suppleness of youth. 
Mere good-nature or even goodness will not 
save the soul alive in middle and old age. 
There is something mental and spiritual that 
has an exact parallel in stoutness of body; it 
might be described as a sort of comfortable 
fuzziness: it ends by smothering the soul in 
excellent good people sometimes. From this 
disease the seekers of the ideal are saved ; their 
49 ^ search 



search keeps them lively. It sharpens their 
faculties. 

% They are like gold-seekers, ransacking 
every soil for the one pure grain. They gain 
in the end great skill in discerning the nature 
of the different soils and rock-veins, in divin- 
ing where this gold streak is to be found. 
/You can tell idealists by their skill in the 
objective. To the common mind, what is 
called a hard fact is something solid, opaque, 
and final. The common mind has the clever- 
ness of the jackdaw in collecting these solid 
objects about it. 

^ A ^^thing" has the same value as a fact, or 
even more ; there it is ; see round it if you dare ; 
that red brick house; that motor-car; is not 
that convincing? See that large lump of 
gold? IWhy will you not bob and curtsey to 
it? 

% But your idealists will not bob until they 
have reflected; they want to penetrate these 
facts, these objects ; of what stream of thought, 
motive, and desire are they the deposit? 
Whence came they? How came they? 
Whither are they tending? As we divine the 
passage of the grinding glacier from the rock- 
heaps it leaves behind, so do they divine the 
50 



courses of the will by the accretion of the solid 
objects about it. You think to impress the 
eye of the ideal thinker by a gold chain or a 
chin or a wrist held high? He will, if his at- 
tention happens to be attracted, at once begin 
to reflect on your symptoms; to analyse the 
conclusions of the mind that have gone to de- 
termine the angle at which your chin or your 
wrist is held; your gold chain will be like a 
little scroll of fine writing and read at a 
glance. 

^ For your true idealist, well trained in the 
sternest of all schools, has a mind agile beyond 
description. How long do you think it would 
take an Emerson to analyse a Rockefeller? 
Half a look, half a word, the recognition of 
an atmosphere; and the story is told. 
^ I am talking of course of the great ones, 
the masters and mistresses who have been long 
on the road and know every yard of it and all 
the signs of the weather. To us, who never 
can hope for such wisdom as theirs, is left the 
continual attempting and the humiliation that 
comes of repeated small failures. The great 
thinkers have their moments of despair; the 
small ones have no temptation to be anything 
but humble. 

51 ^One 



% One cannot even say, "Follow your dream 
and you will be happy." You may be happy, 
you probably will; but you may not; and in 
any case that is not quite what you are after, 
though it generally includes it. Circum- 
stances may be too many for you. But what 
one can say is, Follow your dream and you 
will not be sleepy. You will not be old. You 
will keep a young heart and you will always 
have plenty to do. Your mind will be agile 
and increasingly agile, your life fuller and 
more worth living every day. 
^ These are only a few of the rewards of the 
ideal; they are really so numerous and ex- 
traordinary that one might be all day telling 
them; the harvest is so rich that one hardly 
knows where to begin the tale. Perhaps one 
of the greatest rewards is the increasing value 
and meaning that one finds in simple things. 
The assayer of gold will find that they stand 
the test. The reason seems to me to be that 
there is a perfection in simplicity that is only 
beaten by the very topmost perfection in art 
and scarcely even then. You can have perfect 
bread and cheese for instance. A perfect 
French dinner can only be had by very few. 
Take a boiled egg for another example or a 
52 



whitewashed wall; a fine morning; a rose- 
bush or even a row of peas; for women the 
pleasure of baking a loaf or making a garment 
or bathing a child. For men and women the 
pleasure of making or doing anything really 
well. There are large meanings in these 
simple things ; the idealist sees them, and reads 
them in, always more and more ; only the male 
and female fool deride them. 
^ It follows that as the simple things of life 
grow in beauty and value, so does life itself 
increase in beauty and significance. This 
gain the idealist will find he shares with the 
scientist. Everything is interesting to the 
scientist certainly, but there are degrees of 
interest: a yard of Hedgerow interests him 
more than the drawing-room carpet; a patch 
of the night sky more than the constellations 
of the shop-window. Our pilgrim on his or 
her pilgrimage will find just the same sifting 
of estimates going on in his mind; values will 
change places; the true things, the eternal 
things will come to the top; the temporary 
things go down. Not that we must under- 
value the drawing-room carpet and the shop 
windows. Unless the one is elevated into a 
fetich and the other into a stage upon which 
53 % Folly 



Folly screams at her top note, they are a nat- 
ural and interesting part of life. But the 
pure-hearted woman will not be intoxicated 
by them as the female materialists are. Nor 
can the male materialist plume himself on 
any superiority; his follies may be less gaudy, 
they may be more impure and as trivial in 
their way. 

^ Our pilgrim finds himself more and more 
in love with the simplicities ; his wallet grows 
fuller, but his step is lighter, his eye keener 
as it glances abroad. Moreover he is getting 
forward on his journey. This is another of 
his rewards. There is nothing static in the 
spiritual quest. There is a delicious sense of 
moving onward. There are continual fresh 
horizons appearing. Every point that is 
passed is like a new stage upon the road. 
% There is no delight comparable to that of 
the spiritual life; when I speak of our pilgrim 
being in love with the simplicities, I do not 
mean that he will always be hoeing round a 
rose-bush with his eyes turned up to the stars, 
on a diet of boiled eggs. What I do mean 
is that from the simple things of life to the 
great things is but an easy step. It is a much 
longer and more toilsome step from the in- 
54 



tricacies of a sophisticated life to simple great- 
ness. Cleverness is death to greatness. The 
business point of view, so called, has been the 
v^inding-sheet of many a fine mind. Your 
true quester, who sees straight in simple 
things, will see straight on a steep and crooked 
path that will catch the clever man in a fall. 
And it is not only in straightness and pureness 
that your spiritual man gains; power and 
agility of mind come to him also; and on a 
higher plane than they come to his clever 
friend. 

S| One of his most delightful rewards is the 
good company in which he finds himself. He 
is one of a confraternity. All the poets are 
his brethren, so are the great painters and the 
great musicians. So are the saints, the think- 
ers of all countries and of all religions: their 
wisdom is his, their spiritual consolation is 
his. 

^ Friendships are worth just so much as the 
stuff they feed upon. Do you drink with your 
friend? Then your friendship is worth as 
much and no more than the liquor in the glass. 
Do you hunt with your friend? Your friend- 
ship is worth just so much as a shout across the 
hill. Do you talk with your friend? Of 
55 % what 



what do you talk? Of just that stufif is your 
love or friendship made. It may be worth 
no more than a sensual jest: it may be as broad 
as the seas, as high as the heavens. Let the 
young lovers know that the ideal is the only 
safe bond. In the difficult night the youth 
knows his beloved by the light she carries and 
she him. 

% See now where our pilgrim of the soul 
comes in and pulls off the prize! Of what 
immortal stuff are his loves and his friend- 
ehips made! Instead of forming one of a 
jostling crowd, hungry, selfish, unheeding, he 
climbs a golden ladder on whose steps he 
meets with the angels. Along that rising path 
lie, like summer fragrance, the consolations 
especially needed by sensitive souls in these 
stormy days when the robust progeny of old, 
dead sins are becoming so formidable. The 
idealist finds in his creed a continual encour- 
agement to keep going on. He sees, even in 
events that are untoward and cruel a principle 
of progression. Above the slums of Wapping 
and the acres of chimney-tops he can see the 
apple-trees of the Isles of the Blest, the spires 
of a new city of the children of men. He can 
even foretell the new state whose conditioning 

56 



is in accord with the creative rhythms of the 
universe. 

^ As for himself, he has no fear and no un- 
easiness. A crust is good enough for him. A 
whitewashed room is a paradise. His com- 
panions are the glorious company of the 
apostles. Even death and the judgment are 
his old friends. Nay, death may appear to 
him as a veiled lover, into whose arms he runs 1 



•^^^>* 



'57 



JUL 12 1913 



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